Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  “You think I’ll be shocked.”

  “What’s the American expression? ‘It’s your death.’ Yes?”

  “Funeral. ‘It’s your funeral.’ ”

  In truth, there was a line for Cymbeline, despite her practice of free love and her unorthodox upbringing, so called for the collision of her father’s progressive and traditional beliefs, and, to a certain extent, the bohemian life she was choosing. When sex was too raw, too divorced from feeling, it displaced her. However, her knee-jerk response to someone predicting her preferences, combined with her persistent natural desire for experience, pulled her through the oversize doors.

  Her eyes had to adjust from the simple sunlight of the day to being in a theatrically lit, multistory space that rivaled the train station in scale and seemed almost as populated and diverse as the platz outside. There was a grand common space, ringed with myriad rooms, whose entrances were gathered velvet drapes, or swaths of see-through silk, or strings of colored-glass beads. There were privacy booths and standing floor screens. Swan boats floated on a lake in a lobby large enough to prevent the boats from colliding.

  It wasn’t just the chaos and cut-crystal chandeliers, the painted murals and ceiling of copper stars, or the four gracefully turned staircases carved with mermaids and sea monsters; it was the clash of costumes, decor, and music in many languages. All of which fractured Cymbeline’s focus into a dozen directions, everything in competition with everything else. “What is this place?” she whispered, though Julius could not hear her.

  “Welcome to the poor man’s European tour.”

  “Ah, this is clearly the Bavarian Room, and located, as it should be, next to the Viennese Room through the archway there, so noted for its own overblown operatic bluster. But first, let’s step out onto the Moorish terrace.”

  She followed him in a daze, taking in the abundant national clichés that decorated the rooms (Bavarian, Viennese, Spanish) where patrons dined, drank, gambled, or all three at once. The serving staff were clothed according to their assigned countries, serving the German interpretation of each location’s cuisine.

  Cymbeline and Julius leaned on the carved balcony of Black Forest hunting scenes that divided the Moorish terrace from the main floor. Along the man-made lake was a replica of a Paris quay.

  “And I thought you were going to corrupt me,” said Cymbeline.

  “I said you’d be shocked.”

  “Shall we see what’s upstairs?”

  As they mounted one of the curved stairways, Cymbeline said, “It’s a kitsch palace.”

  “No!” Julius exclaimed as they arrived on the second floor. “It’s France! Next to Vienna!”

  The third floor revealed a Budapest ballroom, with champagne, caviar, dancing, and cabaret. Tucked off in the far corner was a café festooned with enough draping to mimic a Bedouin tent, where harem girls served Turkish coffee.

  The American Wild West Bar, located on the fourth floor, had patrons dancing to a black jazz band.

  “Chicago jazz? In the Old West?” she said.

  “What were they thinking?” He sighed. “It was all so perfect until the jazz. What do you say we return to the Rhineland and I’ll buy you a beer?”

  Back on the main floor they settled into a swan boat, with a Japanese parasol resting against the upholstered bench. They floated on the indoor lake, under the imitation night sky studded with tiny lights, watching boys in lederhosen serve steins of beer to patrons sitting on blankets along the “shore.” Italian opera played in the background.

  Cymbeline opened the oversize parasol, saying, “Do you think someone left this here?” Then she was startled by the sudden clap of thunder and a traveling crack of fake lightning that illuminated the fake night sky, followed by a brief downpour. She laughed as she pulled in close to Julius, who was laughing too. “That was like a one-sided conversation with God,” said Julius.

  “I rather like their interpretation of the Old West as Indians waiting on cowboys. You think it’s a government land issue when it was about tipping all along.”

  The stars twinkled above them in a field of indigo as Julius rowed over to the bank to receive more beer from one of the lederhosen boys. Cymbeline, who rarely drank, was feeling the alcohol. She reclined in the swan boat, relaxed, her eyes closed. Julius trailed his hand in the water. They didn’t speak, but it was a silence of contentment.

  “Aren’t you glad you made me bring you in here?”

  “Oh, my God,” said Cymbeline. “I love this place.”

  “I was being sarcastic.”

  “I know. But I love it anyway.”

  Then she did something a little out of the ordinary; she picked up her camera, saying, “I want to take your picture.” The thing that made the moment unusual was her desire to capture something she never, ever wanted to forget. Her photography was by turns pragmatic and struggling for art, not for memories, not an attempt to record a moment.

  Maneuvering around in the swan boat, given the beer, made her sloppy and apologetic. When she’d finally positioned herself across from Julius, she said, “You’ll have to put down the parasol,” allowing the light from the ersatz moon to catch the planes of his face.

  But the first shot was wrong. She knew it even as she took it. She knew it wouldn’t look like him. “I’m a little drunk,” she confessed.

  “Let me offer a suggestion,” he said. “I’m going to do a mathematical problem in my mind, and when you think I’ve come to the point of the greatest intensity of thought, take the picture.”

  It turned out to be an excellent portrait. But he didn’t look like he was thinking about mathematics; he looked like he was thinking about love.

  When they went back into the searing light of day, Cymbeline, shielding her eyes, asked, “Why did you let me drink?”

  Without thinking, she reached for his watch. It was 2:00 in the afternoon. She moaned a little, to which he said, “It seems I corrupted you after all. Come on, we’ll get you something to eat.”

  The Tiergarten was less like a city garden and more like a garden city, with its wide boulevards, meadows, woods, flower beds, gazebos, outdoor theaters and café. Like those of the train station and the Piccadilly, the dimensions were impressive. “Does everything in Berlin have to be so excessive in size?” asked Cymbeline.

  “Only when you have a kaiser with a child’s arm,” answered Julius. Kaiser Wilhelm, the German emperor and King of Prussia, had been born with a withered arm that, it was rumored, emotionally ruled his life, and not in a good way.

  Rows of tulips bloomed in the plots next to them. When Cymbeline looked at Julius as he was telling her a story from his own student days, she noticed that it appeared as if the flowers were arranged on his head, like a strange sort of floral crown. Asking him to hold very still, she took another picture.

  She didn’t know what she expected the night she shared a room with Julius. He meant to sleep on whatever furniture there was in the room to allow Cymbeline the bed, but there was nothing usable. No sofa. One armchair. One small dresser. A rug on a floor that was mostly wood. He was almost apologetic about the whole thing, as if it were his fault.

  They were fortunate to have any room at all, since the train derailment had stranded so many passengers. There would be no trains until the early morning; there had been two casualties and many more injuries. “I’m trustworthy,” said Julius. And Cymbeline found herself thinking, I hope not.

  Julius said he was going to walk to the drugstore to buy them toothbrushes.

  As soon as he left, Cymbeline unfolded her camera and waited until he appeared, four stories down, on the street below.

  “Julius!” she called, causing him to look up, his hand shading his eyes. “Think of an impossible chemical compound,” she called. As he was posing, people passed all around him, so that he was only another face in the crowd. She took the shot anyway, knowing that he would be the clearest figure since he wasn’t moving.

  The awkwardness of their situ
ation, made more awkward by their being unable to speak of its awkwardness, had them avoiding the room. In response, they stayed out as late as possible, which was how Cymbeline ended up seeing her first operetta, an entertainment that reminded her of the Piccadilly in that it wasn’t quite a musical, and not quite an opera, and less entertaining than advertised.

  Afterward they walked down a street of beautiful homes. Then a street of businesses. A street of bars and cabarets. A street of immigrants. They stopped beneath the Brandenburg Gate, huge, Neoclassical, with Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory, being pulled in a chariot by four horses. As Cymbeline stood between two of the Doric columns, running her hand on one of them, she asked, “This isn’t about the child-arm again, is it?”

  Julius laughed. “Someone else beat him to it.”

  “I think I saw one of these in the Piccadilly.”

  “Was it made of strudel?”

  “No, it was schnitzel.”

  The lights from the avenue of linden trees that stretched behind the gate created a ghostly effect. She stepped back from the gate. She unlocked her camera case. “Can you stand in the central arch? Under the horses?”

  “It’s not allowed actually. I’m not royal, so I must use the spaces at either end.” He positioned himself, without posing in the slightest, between two columns near the end.

  “Think about being allowed to walk through the center of the gate but choosing not to, and when you get to the most ridiculous part of that edict, I’ll take the picture.”

  As it happened, he was smiling.

  Julius gallantly tried to sleep on the floor, but his tossing and turning distracted Cymbeline from sleep, and, for the tenth time, she asked him to sleep beside her. On the eleventh time, he said yes.

  They arranged the sheets so that he was on top, and she was underneath, and the blanket covered them both. They kept on as many clothes as they could without looking too rumpled in the morning.

  Cymbeline must have dozed off because she awoke within that strange consciousness where you are awake enough to know that you aren’t in your own bed but can’t for the life of you figure out whose bed you are in. She must know the man beside her, she told herself, as she struggled for understanding. Her eyes scanned the room, fixating on the light from the window to adjust to the darkness. The sounds of the city, muted in the very early morning hours, were unfamiliar. Her heart knocking against her chest as the adrenaline surged through her so that she was suddenly fully awake. The calm aftermath was like recovering from a sprint, full of relief and exhaustion. The man beside her was Julius. Without shifting her position as she lay on her back, she slipped her hand into his.

  “You’re okay,” he said. “It was just a bad dream.”

  Later, she could not say how it started, but the way it ended was unforgettable. She remembered her fingers threaded through his hair and his kisses in places that made her long for him years later.

  Then everything wound down to nothing, Julius quiet as he lay beside her, his fingers lightly resting on her arm.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked.

  “I thought you would understand Berlin.”

  “No. Here.”

  “Waiting for the morning.”

  They were silent.

  “Do I mean anything to you?”

  He said nothing.

  “I love you, you know.” Then, because she couldn’t take back what she hadn’t intended to say, she added, “I love you.” And that was when she felt the rearrangement of every molecule in the room.

  “Schiss, schiss, schiss,” he said so softly she almost couldn’t hear it. He said, “I wanted to have Berlin to remember you by, you know, so maybe I would miss you a little less.”

  But I can stay! she wanted to cry out. I want to stay!

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally.

  His apology scraped across her heart, leaving her angry and confused and in love and angry and confused.

  She once read that the sea will silently pull a mile back into itself before returning to the shore as a tsunami. In the stillness of this moment, she fought against being overwhelmed by a violent surge of truth and loss that felt imminent. She said, “How could I have been so stupid.” She said, “Of all the girls in the city you pick me? Schiss.”

  “You’re not the other girls.”

  Now she was sitting up. “And what about your wife? Is she ‘not the other girls’?” (No response.) “Or is it a girlfriend?” (No response.) “How not the other girls is she?”

  He turned his back to her as he sat on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands. In the morning light she could see his hair, mussed and ungroomed, his undershirt, his slim, square shoulders, so perfect to her, exposed. She loved him she loved him she loved him—every other thought obliterated but that one.

  “I don’t have a woman.” He turned toward her. “Do you see now?” He rose and began to dress. She watched him. He paused to tell her that their train left in an hour and did she want to meet at the station?

  The sun was up, flooding the room.

  She crossed to the window and saw him disappear down the street. It all came back to her: the advance and retreat of their relationship; the genuine camaraderie and shared interests. The warmth between them that never quite caught. The comment about the suffragettes, and people being allowed to be who they are. The young man, Otto Girondi, at the Photographic Exposition—the same young man who had been laughing in Julius’s office. (“I teach maths,” he had said.) The look of love on Julius’s face in the picture where he was thinking of a mathematical equation.

  It was so needlessly trusting, she thought, to see something every day and not for one minute consider that there is an underneath.

  Before she dressed, Cymbeline unfolded her camera, slid in a plate, and took a picture of a bed with rumpled sheets, and a pair of hairpins.

  PICTURES OF BERLIN, 1910 BY CYMBELINE KELLEY

  1. Waiting Room, Anhalter Bahnhof

  (A cavernous train station of four waiting rooms, including one used exclusively by the Hohenzollerns)

  2. Mathematics & Love

  (“I’m going to do a mathematical problem in my mind, and when you think I’ve come to the point of the greatest intensity of thought, take the picture.”)

  3. Tulips

  (A crown of tulips in his hair)

  4. Late at Night, the Brandenburg Gate

  (Avoiding the awkwardness of a shared room)

  5. Something to Want

  (Julius looking up at Cymbeline from the crowded Berlin sidewalk where all she could see was him)

  6. The Unmade Bed

  (Two confessions of love)

  There was one more photograph from Dresden that she always kept with those Berlin pictures. A seventh picture. It was the one Julius took of her that first time they ran into each other at The Procession of Princes. It was called Julius, though no one but Cymbeline ever knew exactly why.

  PART 3: AMERICA

  The Third Fire Lit by Mary Doyle, 1917

  Cymbeline sifted through the rubble that used to be her darkroom. She opened a charred barrel that stored a number of glass-plate negatives from her old portrait studio, the one she’d closed when she married Leroy; her attachment to many of the images wasn’t to the pictures themselves but to the life she’d left behind. She thought about her first photo exhibition. Then she thought about Bosco and how she would gladly give up anything for him.

  But there are all kinds of love in the world. So when she came across the six spared glass-plate negatives in the black leather case from a day and a night in Berlin, and the seventh glass plate from Dresden from 1910, she felt her heart break all over again. Berlin, she told herself, was a door and a prison.

  After she and Julius returned to Dresden, their friendship left them and was replaced by a professional association. They experimented with less expensive printing materials. They continued to play with ideas of color. He was Professor Weisz, she Miss Kelley, and the peopl
e they were before and during Berlin turned to dust.

  Cymbeline returned to the States by way of London, where she attended a massive women’s rights rally in Hyde Park on July 23, 1910, which was largely peaceful though with an undercurrent of menace. She opened her Seattle portrait studio, telling her sitters “to think of the nicest thing you know,” because if they emptied their minds it was impossible to get a good picture. She told them this as well.

  Then Leroy wooed her, telling her that her being named for a king and his name meaning “king” in French was kismet, and she believed herself in love again. Then Bosco. Then Mary Doyle. Then the third fire.

  Thoughts of Mary continually crossed her mind as she did her best to pack up her household, with the occasional helpful presence of her mother, and the burden of her pregnancy.

  They’d first met when Cymbeline, driven to tears by Bosco as she was shopping for groceries, was helped by Mary Doyle, resulting in her hire. Cymbeline thought about how Mary was pretty in a way that Cymbeline was not, her black hair, pale, pale skin accented with roses, and her blue eyes straight out of Manet’s palette. Cymbeline thought about how Leroy, so frequently cranky and complaining, was never impatient with Mary Doyle, and how solicitous she was with him.

  She thought about how Leroy had never been in town when the fires started, or had any of his personal belongings been scorched.

  And though Leroy, for all his bluster, always made Cymbeline feel beautiful, even when pregnant and pale and green about the gills, she wasn’t young and their marriage wasn’t a honeymoon; they were deep into it now, and they both knew they were deep into it. It was so easy to forget that he’d once courted her.

  • • •

  It was disconcerting to see Mary Doyle outside the context of the house, and her complete lack of concern at either being in custody or seeing Cymbeline. Cymbeline considered the idea that a simple girl could covet her position as wife to an artist.